1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data representations, and more particularly to a method for the individual representation of data on a variety of different computing systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Many types of user devices communicate over various communication networks. Information requested by a user device over a communication network naturally needs to be provided to the user device in a format understood by the specific user device. Therefore, in many instances information is only accessible to a certain group of user devices. For example, homepages of individuals or companies provided by a web server over the Internet are generally available only to specific user devices, namely computer systems supporting the regular homepage data format HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language).
However, the access of other user devices to this information may also be desirable. Such user devices may be, for example, handheld computers or mobile telephones. Unfortunately, the Internet browsers that process and display the HTML homepages typically require over 50 Megabytes of storage, which is not available on handheld computers or mobile phones.
Alternative methods are available, for example, that permit mobile telephones to send and receive information from the Internet. Typically, a program executing on the telephone transmits a URL, or a representation of a URL to a server that translates the request, and retrieves the data over the Internet. The server then converts the retrieved content into a format that can be interpreted by the mobile telephone and transmits the data to the mobile telephone for display. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,809,415 of Rossmann entitled “Method and Architecture for an Interactive Two-Way Data Communication Network.”
Another similar approach is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,727,159, entitled “System In Which a Proxy-Server Translates Information Received From the Internet Into a Form/Format Readily Usable by Low Power Portable Computers,” of Kikinis issued on Mar. 10, 1998. In this approach, a specialized browser must be installed on each device that communicates with a proxy-server that in turn communicates with the Internet. A device that does not have the specialized browser, or cannot execute the specialized browser cannot retrieve or display content using the proxy-server.
Thus, the prior art teaches that it is necessary to develop an independent technique to provide access to particular information. For example, the prior art technique for mobile phones was not used on portable computers and conversely.